On October 31, 1989, before dawn, 50-year-old Ida Lee Delaney was gunned down by three off-duty cops of the HPD who were on their way home after an all-night drinking binge. Apparently Ida Lee Delaney on her way work at the defunct Houston Post, had cut off Alex Gonzales on the freeway. In a fit of road rage, the men chased her down. Now this is Texas, SOMEBODY is gonna have a gun and Ida had one and began shooting at the car full of men trying to run her down not knowing that they were cops who also had guns.
After racing some 13 miles, Delaney finally pulled over. When she did, Delaney shot and wounded Gonzales; he, in turn, shot and killed her. A year later in Gonzales's trail, it would be known that after Delaney pulled over, an argument ensued between Alex and Ida provoking her into shooting him, before he returned fire and killed her.
The next City Council meeting, days after Delaney's death, hundreds of women gathered at the meeting and disrupted the session demanding that the council members talk about jailing the cops. This began before the public feedback part of the council session when Mayor Kathy Whitmire still sat at the council bench. This was the kind of organic response that long winded has-beens like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are never around for and it is also the kind of reaction that Jackson and Sharpton's detractors would never want to be caught dead at because there was no poised reenactment of Montgomery sit-ins with people dressed in Sunday school regalia.
This was a council chamber full of howling angry women who remembered the 60s and 70s when cops harassed everyone; not just black men. I remember watching the disrupted meeting on local public access. For me at the time, I was taking a mid-day break before heading off to a meeting or something at S.H.A.P.E Center. At this point in my political and personal life, I was "down it" as far as community activism. I was a member of one of those Marxist-Leninist parties that sells newspapers, and although I will always believe (as I did then) that the organization I belonged to were closest to the definition of what a true socialist party is supposed to be (their members were actually workers), I was not exactly the example of the keeper of the party's norms. I wanted to be deeply involved with struggles that effected the black community and I wanted to do the work without having to hawk papers at gatherings and meetings. I was unemployed around this time, so most of my free time consisted of a two hour job search in the morning and the rest of the day was all about coalition meetings, hanging at the Library, etc. But now, I'm watching this event at the city council live and I'm thinking that if I leave my seat to get down there, I'm going to miss these women expressing their outrage of this murder committed by drunken cops.
